NetView: Towards on-demand network-wide telemetry in the data center

Network telemetry is to collect information (e.g., hop latency, throughput) from network devices. Network-wide telemetry is critical for operators to understand the quality of network performance and to diagnose on-going failures. The state-of-the-art telemetry approaches are far from ideal as they are unable to fully satisfy diverse requirements of operators, specifically for on-demand, full coverage, and scalable telemetry. In this paper, we provide a new framework of network telemetry for data center networks, called NetView. NetView can support various telemetry applications and telemetry frequencies on demand, monitoring each device via proactively sending dedicated probes while only one vantage server is required. Technically, NetView divides the probe into a forwarding stack and a telemetry stack, which are respectively responsible for flexible forwarding and network status monitoring, achieving full coverage and visibility. Besides, a series of probe generation algorithms and update algorithms largely reduce probe number, providing high scalability. The evaluation shows that NetView reduces the bandwidth occupancy by more than two orders of magnitude compared with Pingmesh and INT-path, and conducts network-wide telemetry for the data center network with thousands of switches using only one vantage server, without bringing about resources bottleneck.